


Meat, Metal, and a Light in the Window

by witchesdiner



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: 10/3, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 16:10:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4926274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchesdiner/pseuds/witchesdiner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for 10/3</p><p>Alphonse reflects on what it means to feel and sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meat, Metal, and a Light in the Window

Alphonse does not dream.

Or he does not remember ever dreaming since he switched back bodies.

He remembers that it was painful to feel all at once, all over again when most of the life that he was consciously himself he could not. Before, he was emotions, charged and running around and under and in between metal molecules. After, he became sensations, and sounds, lights, colors, smells, tastes, hands reaching to clutch his own, bodies pulling him closer became too much at times.

Things are different when a soul is infused in meat. Meat- that’s the name of the thing he feels when nights come, when his body is too heavy with life and sadness and joy and he sits on a chair on the porch and pretends to nod off, to dream.

Edward liked to hang a blanket off the back of the chair when he visited. It was a patchwork quilt, all different textures and colors and patterns. Alphonse liked to have it folded up and over his knees, liked to trace the raised velvet flowers and embroidered little knots of stars.

Tonight, he pulls it over his head, over ears and eyes. And he dreams. Or he pretends to.

There is a light on in a house far away and he waits for it to go out. It needs to go out, this light, so that all the stars can come back. He is walking behind Edward, big and bulky and scared. He hunches to make himself smaller because he feels smaller.

Edward points at the house and charges toward the window. This is the part where Alphonse pretends to wake up. He does not know what should happen next.

He does not know what the light means or why he can see it clearly in his mind’s eyes, flaming bright against the early evening skies.

He supposes it does not mean anything. And it doesn’t.

Alphonse thinks that the house from the dream might be the one they all lived in, before all the befores that he cannot dream of.

 _It’s our house_ , he tells himself, though he only remembers what it looks like because of the pictures he found in a desk at the Rockbell’s.

He remembers the day they set it on fire, but he cannot reconstruct the building in his mind. He cannot repaint it, he cannot say which hall led to which room, which window would never open or close without a fight.

The windows were closed? and the glass burst outward.

Alphonse remembered he was warm and perhaps Edward should not have let him stand so close. He had said nothing and inched closer. It was the first time he’d felt heat in this one of his bodies. It sunk through his metal plates.

It was the first time he’d felt like he was _in_ that body.

He had thought the feeling would go away, that he would feel weird again. And he did but he also didn’t. When he performed alchemy, when he stood close to the small fires Edward would set to keep himself warm, it was there. That feeling that he belonged, even as he was.

Edward was so quick to separate Alphonse’s body and Alphonse’s _body_. And Alphonse wanted to too. So _my body_ was doors away.

It was all real, it was all him. But now, sitting in his chair on the porch running his hands through the blanket warmed by his head and warming his head, he knew it was better to be like this.

He looked out over the fields, at all the lights from recently-built houses. They flickered gently, like lantern light, like his other eyes.

He sat for a long time, watching as, one by one, the lights were put out. When there was only one light left, he stood up, blanket switched to sitting over his shoulders, and headed to the door.

It struck Alphonse that the light might mean something. That not wanting to see it go out might mean something. In years past, he would have sat back down and thought through every possible meaning, whittle it down to a definite shape in his head. Like those nights where it was physically impossible to sleep, when he chased down thoughts and ran them over and over.

Perhaps it was a sign of growth that he did not try to figure it out. 


End file.
